Boulder – Three-ring binders sit on Tyler Hamilton’s desk, forming a near-total eclipse of the wall behind it. The eight of them could very well carry the clippings of a cycling career that, if all had gone according to plan, would put him in France this summer as a possible roadblock to Lance Armstrong’s seventh consecutive Tour de France title.

But the binders carry more uplifting words than anything out of a news- paper or magazine. They are e-mails from hundreds of doctors, researchers – even medical students – who think his two-year suspension for blood doping is a raw deal and challenge the validity of the test he flunked.

“They’re like, ‘I’m not a cyclist. I don’t really care about the sport. I even think you’re ugly,”‘ the former University of Colorado skier said, laughing.

Hamilton, 34, and his wife, Haven, have remained surprisingly upbeat throughout an eight-month ordeal that has cost them more than $1 million in lost income and legal fees and has put Hamilton’s career one tiny step from oblivion. Sitting Wednesday morning in their dream home high in the Boulder hills overlooking a spectacular valley below, their disposition seemed as sunny as the postcard-perfect weather outside.

Hamilton’s situation isn’t. On April 18, an arbitration panel voted 2-1 against his appeal of the U.S. Anti-Doping Agency’s two- year suspension for positive tests at the Summer Olympics and the Tour of Spain. He has appealed to the Court of Arbitration for Sport; the Lausanne, Switzerland-based organization will hear the case in Denver, probably in late June.

If he loses the appeal, he can’t return to racing until he’s at least 36. Considering that Armstrong, at 33 years and 10 months, would be the oldest to win the Tour de France in the modern era, Hamilton’s career essentially would be finished.

“I’m not even thinking that way,” Hamilton said. “I’m innocent and I believe in this process.”

“Twin” theory espoused

Hamilton and his lawyer, Howard Jacobs, presented numerous arguments in their first appeal. A major argument was a theory called “a vanishing twin.”

The USADA claims Hamilton transfused someone else’s blood into his body to create more red blood cells and, thus, more oxygen, which would increase his endurance.

Hamilton and his scientific experts testified that the different blood was created from a twin that died in his mother’s womb. It’s a theory that produced guffaws across the sporting world. Sports Illustrated even listed it as “This Week’s Sign of the Apocalypse.”

Dick Pound, chairman of the World Anti-Doping Agency, said Hamilton should keep his Olympic time trial gold medal in his drawer.

“The overall point is Mr. Hamilton had the opportunity to present all of his defenses to an independent arbitration panel which rejected and found him to commit a doping violation,” USADA general counsel Travis Tygart said, “and that he had no reasonable explanation for why he had mixed red blood cell population, which all of his experts agreed.”

However, in a major story in The New York Times’ science section May 10, Georgetown University’s Dr. Helain Landy said 20 to 30 percent of all pregnancies that start out as twins end up as single babies. In the first trimester, blood from one baby goes into the survivor. The process is called chimerism and those numbers reflect a much more common occurrence than claimed by Ross Brown, a hematologist from Sydney’s Royal Prince Alfred Hospital, who testified for the USADA.

“Ross Brown said he saw 20,000 blood samples and never saw a chimerism,” Haven Hamilton said. “The question to Ross Brown is, ‘Have you ever looked for one?’ Before they started looking for HIV, they didn’t think HIV was in the blood supply. So it’s the kind of thing where now that they’re looking for it, they’re finding it more often.”

True, said Ann Reed, chairwoman of rheumatology research at the Mayo Clinic. She told The Times that 50 to 70 percent of healthy people are chimeras and that this wasn’t known before because no one specifically looked for foreign blood cells.

“They’re confusing the issues,” Tygart said. “What those labs look for is mixed red blood cell populations. When they do, they then determine what causes them. Out of those found to be mixed red blood cell populations, 70 to 100 out of millions were chimerism. The next step, if you find mixed red blood cell populations, which in millions they didn’t, but in ones that you do, what do you do? They then track those down.”

Purdue University’s Paul Robinson, president of the International Society of Analytical Cytology, which deals with flow cytometry – the blood transfusion test – said the odds of a chimera are about 1 in 2,400.

David Housman, a molecular biology professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, read about Hamilton’s case in The Boston Globe and volunteered to testify on his behalf. He claims the test done in a blood bank is far less sensitive than one needed to check for chimerism.

“(Chimerism) is a lot more common than USADA is claiming it is,” he said. “Ross Brown’s testimony is riddled with factual errors and inconsistencies. … Anything done in a blood bank has a much different level of sensitivity. Now you increase the level of sensitivity, you come up with tests that now have a greater sensitivity and the 20,000 tests he’s run are not even run with the full panel of antigens they use in the screening test.

“He knows it.”

Test is questioned

The Hamiltons attacked the blood-doping test, used on pregnant women for more than 20 years but not on male cyclists until April 2004. The test is designed to find blood with minor antigens different from an athlete’s own blood. Antigens are substances that are foreign to the body and cause the immune system to produce antibodies to fight it.

Housman said there are two major problems with the test. One, technicians who perform flow cytometry tests deal almost exclusively in white blood cells and rarely with red.

Also, unlike HIV tests, there is no backup test to prove the first test is accurate.

“What’s faulty about the test is there has not been a proper attempt to deal with the false- positive issue,” Housman said. “There was no effort, ever, to deal with specificity. In other words, people who developed the test simply believe there are no false positives.

“They just didn’t do it.”

Tygart, however, says a “B” sample is taken to verify the first “A” sample, and a “B” was taken from Hamilton after the Tour of Spain.

“He and his expert were there,” Tygart said. “They saw the opening and stayed for the entire laboratory process. They didn’t make one specific challenge to the laboratory process.”

However, the Hamiltons and Housman say a false positive calculates how many accurate results you get during the research process and that the “B” test was as faulty as the “A” test.

The agency also offered to pay for a test to prove he wasn’t a chimera and Hamilton refused because he said the test could not prove he was a chimera, Hamilton said.

“If he’s not a chimera,” Tygart said, “that means he’s a doper.”

Charges of stacked deck

Hamilton also had to explain why teammate Santiago Perez received the same positive test at the Tour of Spain. Hamilton said it was a setup. Ten days after the Tour of Spain, the Union Cycliste International, cycling’s governing body, ordered Perez to their headquarters in Lausanne. They told him to bring a doctor.

“It scared him,” Hamilton said. “He thought he had cancer. He gets there and boom! The joke’s on you. We’re taking your blood.”

Perez tested positive and UCI rushed the hearing, originally scheduled for May, to February, Hamilton said. UCI gave him four days’ notice and denied an extension. Hamilton said Perez and his lawyers could not make it in time and UCI declared him guilty.

“Guess when they came out with a verdict,” Hamilton said. “The same day as my hearing started. That’s important. So going into my hearing there was already an athlete who has tested positive and who has a two-year suspension. So straightaway the cards were already dealt.”

That doesn’t explain why Perez tested positive. Hamilton said his positive test result surfaced before Perez’s and that the literature they received on the test last spring said a blood transfusion would test positive for four months.

“If Santi Perez had transfused blood from another person and his teammate allegedly tests positive for the same thing, would Santi stay in the race or head for the hills?” Haven said.

Hamilton and Perez were the first and only cyclists to test positive with the new blood-doping test. Hamilton was asked why, if chimerism is common, none of the hundreds of other pro cyclists tested positive.

“You know what? For people to sacrifice as much as these riders do, to work as hard as they do, they deserve better.”

Hamilton said he didn’t get the raw data from the Spain test for five months and did not receive the data from a subsequent negative test after the Tour of Spain.

Optimistic about appeal

Last spring, the UCI warned Hamilton about abnormal test scores that recorded high readings of hematocrit, a measure of the volume of red blood cells.

“We had abnormal readings,” Hamilton said. “We had high readings. We also had low readings. They always want to say, ‘He had a high number.’ I also had a crazy low number at the start of the Tour de France. There was an 11-point range. The whole team was low.”

Hamilton remains optimistic about his appeal to the CAS. He and his lawyer not only have more information to present, but he testified at a CAS hearing in January when Phonak successfully appealed its ban from the Tour de France after Hamilton’s suspension.

He pointed out a USADA code that requires accused athletes to prove their innocence beyond “reasonable doubt” while the prosecution must prove its point to merely a “comfortable satisfaction.”

“I felt like the three (CAS) panel members listened to everything I had to say and asked a lot of good questions,” Hamilton said. “To be honest, when I walked out of the CAS hearing I knew we would be the team to get back in.”

If he wins his appeal, Hamilton expects Phonak to let him back on the team. He won’t make the Tour de France in July but would race in the Tour of Spain in September and the World Cycling Championships later that month, also in Spain.

He still makes his daily five- hour training rides in Phonak equipment with a firm belief that he has not lost the popularity that peaked when he finished fourth in the 2003 Tour de France despite a broken collarbone.

He repeatedly gets honks and thumbs up from passing motorists reminding him of his enduring popularity.

In a bike expo Saturday in Aurora, 105 people rode with him during a recreational ride, and later a standing-room-only crowd of nearly 100 joined him for a Q&A and autograph session at Bicycle Village.

He would like to start a union for nonunionized Olympic athletes. He feels fortunate he had a one-time seven-figure income to fight his war.

“What if this had happened to a 25-year-old rider?” Haven said. “What if this had happened to a bobsledder? What if this had happened to somebody in the Home Depot Olympic Program? Where do they begin to fight this? You have to fight, not just for Tyler, but for every one of those people.”

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